Summer’s ICEE Guide: Target

There are two Target’s in the Bryan-College Station area and both serve ICEEs along with the usual Target café food (hot dogs, soft pretzels, Pizza Hut personal pans) and having a Starbucks. As they are pretty similar in nature, I’ll cover them both on one post.

Locations

Sizes & Costs

Target offers all three sizes of ICEE and their prices are only about 30 cents higher than what I consider the standard ICEE prices.

Small

$1.59

Medium

$1.79

Large

$2.09

If you have one of their REDCard things, they sometimes do freebie days for small ICEEs.

Flavors

The Bryan Target has a four flavor ICEE machine, while the College Station one now sports one four and one three! The latter does seem to vary the extra flavors, while keeping the standard Coke on tap at all times. The Bryan one seems to stick to fairly stock flavors, but it does often rotate in a special or seasonal flavor in one slot, so if you’re looking for one, Target can be a good place to check.

Quality

The College Station Target used to have a horrible machine, always messy and broken, but I think they finally replaced it with a better one. When I rechecked it for this post, it was clean and definitely newer looking. When I went back in June 2018, they had two machines, the same four flavor plus a new three flavor. While the Bryan one is a much newer Target in general and I believe it has a newer machine, I did have to laugh at the Bryan one being out-of-order the day I went to get a picture. 🙂

Target, in general, seems to do poorly on maintaining the right settings on their machines, though, leading to excessive CO2 in the ICEE (which then leads to faster separation of ice/syrup). They also have a little less flavor to me, possibly from poor syrup ratios, and melt faster.

Target randomly alternates between using their own cups and official ICEE cups, and they only offer their crappy, super thin soda straws for larger sizes instead of the big red ones. So I recommend either having official ones on hand yourself, or swing through the Starbucks in the same stores where you can grab one of their nice wide ones (I’ve done this before and they were fine with it).